Over the past weeks, the city of Hamburg in Germany was caught up in ongoing occasionally violent standoffs and demonstrations between left-wing protestors and the police over development plans in several poorer neighborhoods that have historically been centers for the city's counterculture, as the Atlantic Cities recently outlined.

The situation degenerated to a point that the police saw the need to establish a 4.6 square mile "danger zone" covering the affected areas, encompassing a population of 50,000, in which the police had the right to stop, question and frisk people without any concrete suspicion.